


We Stand at the Bottom of the Loch

by Mamcine_Oxfeather



Series: The Ballad of Mad Mahariel [2]
Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Gen, M/M, Slash, see first series work for full list / summary, slowbuild
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-16
Updated: 2016-04-16
Packaged: 2018-06-02 15:16:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6571225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mamcine_Oxfeather/pseuds/Mamcine_Oxfeather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Redcliffe chapter in the Ballad of Mad Mahariel (As Howling Winds Across the Steppes, series).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

: : o : : O : : o : :

* * *

The sun stood high in an overcast noontide, its light suffused to a warm dull ocher through the skeletal pine branches surrounding Redcliffe's townsend basin.

Mathain's eyebrows lowered furious over the dark yellow of his unblinking glare. He stood like a man who had just had his plate of stew knocked clean out of his hands, arms stiff in front of his middle, one foot forward. His voice lowered in its urgency, threaded with a scratch of confusion, "They  _allowed -_?" his incredulity stole the sound from his question and his mouth worked over into a frown. The fury shifted, flickered, a small flinch across one cheek and brow, dismantling his emotions one by one as they passed. Pity, surprise,  _anger_ , confusion, resolve, the pucker of sympathy -

Alistair sighed hard through his nose, crossing his arms, glancing down the sandy slope of the road just past the cliff bridge. "Don't. Whatever it is you're thinking, just don't." He huffed a rueful chuckle, rearranging his weight from one foot to the other and back. "I was  _taken care of_. I had a hayloft in the stables, free meals, something like a tutor - more than most orphans get."

"More than-" and here Mathain's voice  _did_  rise with the lurking tension of his outrage. " _Souver'vhenan_ , just what do you people  _do_  to your lost children? Are they excess rags, to be tossed in the cookpit?" He did not blink, not even as he started to pace, glare fixed at Alistair - not unlike an owl might swivel its body beneath its head and glare from its treebranch at the mouse in the ferns.

"Well, I don't know!" Alistair resolved not to laugh, but only just. "I didn't exactly have any  _say_  in it, did I?"

"Of course not," Mathain snapped. "I am only  _disgusted_  by the behavior of your guardians." And here Mathain did make a visible effort to calm himself, pinching gloved fingers against the bridge of his nose, blinking hard, slowing his pace. "No child - no elvhenan child would have been set apart from their kin like that - I don't understand -"

Gently, Alistair corrected - "Well I wasn't an elf born into a clan, was I? I was a bastard from a noble's indiscreet union with - "

"I  _know_ ," Mathain shook his head, pleading with the sky above them, the column of his throat working around a swallow. "I know well of shem habits and prejudices, of how they treat each other in terms of  _breeding_  and political hierarchy and, and what-all. I've read of your histories and fables."

"For all that, you seem awfully surprised just now."

"No book could prepare me to learn of this. No book  _detailed_  what might be done - of their own - !" A helpless appeal with elbows and palms.

"The only people to whom I was 'their own' were dead, Thain. It's just not something you expect of others, who aren't, er, blood. To take a child in for no reason, for no gain. Perhaps I might have ended up the ward of an elderly couple, to work their farm, or gone straight to the chantry, or been left in the gutter to beg." A casual shrug, the whispering rattle of armor in a fidget. "What I'm trying to tell you is what  _did_  happen, not what could have."

" _Abelas_ , of course." Mathain rolled his gaze to rest back on Alistair, regard heavy with scrutiny. "So this Arl is  _some_  relation of yours, to not have thrown you out with the bathwater, and will prove to us  _some_  amount of use?"

"Yes." Alistair dropped his arms, nodding slowly. "I owe him much, and - well, actually. That wasn't my point, him being of use to us, maybe, no. Maybe, I mean, yes? The last I spoke to Eamon, in fact, I was still - well it was long before I joined the Wardens, and we didn't exactly part on, er, what might be called _good_ terms."

"Then we turn ourselves aft," Mathain marched toward Alistair, "And we find," his nose was nearly under Alistair's chin, until there was a shove, " _Other_ ," another shove, this one drawing up a protest, " _Means_."

"Well he's  _probably_ ," Alistair shoved back, the march of his steps in mimic, " _Amenable_ ," shove, "To our  _cause_." This last shove met a stony resistance, and Alistair had to slouch down in attempt to dislodge Mathain's lower center of gravity, which saw them forehead-to-forehead, each trying to press the other back. "As  _Wardens_  -"

Mathain huffed along in his struggle to unfoot Alistair. His eyes cast a desperate search in the blurry heat and sweat of their stag press. "You had to sleep  _alone_ , apart from the homestead, from your kin?"

"I didn't  _have_  any kin," Alistair surged forward, Mathain's boots sliding across the dry sand of the cobbled bridge in the scuffle. "And there were horses in that stable, so it wasn't as if I'd freeze. I was  _fed_ and  _safe_. Please don't use -" Their hands locked, fingers curling in a secondary struggle to bend one-another's greaves out of joint. " - some skewed Dalish propriety as an excuse to -  _ooph_  - to alienate one of our very,  _very_  few,  _argh_ , allies -"

Mathain twisted sharply to the side, pulling Alistair forward to send him lurching down the bridge back the way they had come. He stood, straightened his armor. "And this Isolde, this wife of Eamon, did not hold the child in her lap," Mathain made for a cutting figure in the center of the bridge, as Alistair righted himself from the stumble. "When it was ill? And nobody to soothe the child's hurts as it might learn to wield the paring knife, to teach it how to write its name in the stars? And when the child slept, it slept with only the confusion of beasts to answer its night-terrors?"

Alistair arrested a hard sigh, facing the roadsign to Redcliffe. His shield-hand worked in and out of a grip.

Mathain's voice thickened, anger lurking as bright and hot as the sun behind the overcast noontide, "And those who loved its father, could not or  _would not_  love that child? Even if other shem would be -  _could_ be - as petty and disinterested in one another as they so very often are, I would assume - it would  _be assumed_  -" and the words fell short, breathless, silent, buried under a mumbled Dalish curse.

Alistair protested quietly, a hard rasp in the wind. "It's... complicated." He rolled his shoulders back, gaze lingering at the roadsign as he turned to face the bridge once more. "More complicated than - well. The lot of any other orphan, really." Alistair turned his chin, his eyes settled on Mathain. His mouth worked, throat swallowing, expression going crooked. "Are... are you  _crying_?"

"Nae," Mathain scrubbed at his eye with the leather heel of his glove. "Your people  _vex_ me, as does the smithing sand in this wind."

"Well, I've done more weeping for myself and my situation than anyone else possibly ever could. Yep. All set on pity. Can I finish what I was saying before?"

Mathain braced his fists on his hips, jaw pushed out. He nodded, grim, eyes gone red from all the supposed forge-sand in the wind.

Alistair rallied his resolve with a roll of the shoulders. "So, with the Arlina holding no high opinion of me and all those suspicions of the Arl being my father and that, Eamon sent me to the chantry - again, not a bad lot for an orphan, the chantry. I didn't  _want_  to be a Templar, but again it was a damn sight better than growing up to be an unemployable drifter. At  _the time_  -" Alistair fidgeted, stepping to the bridge wall to rest his elbows forward. "At the time, I was just an angry child. The last I had seen of Eamon, he had come to me to hand off an, um, something precious that had once belonged to my mother. An amulet, or pendant - it was fragile - carved silverite stone, I remember."

Mathain joined Alistair's side, glaring imperiously down at Redcliffe with the heels of his palms braced on the cobbled wall flat.

"I thought he was abandoning me. I wasn't a son, exactly, to Eamon, maybe more like a nephew - he  _cared_  about me, that much was obvious, until the moment when he was giving me up, giving in to somebody else's fancies of suspicion - because even  _if_  I had been Eamon's son, he wouldn't have handed me off to the church like some - I don't know -"

Mathain frowned distantly, concern nudging itself across his expression.

" _Maker_ , I couldn't even fathom. But I was hurt, and madder than anything, and in a fit I threw the pendant he'd brought me and it just  _shattered_  against the wall - and I blamed him for as much as all that, too, I suppose. Stupidly." Alistair scoffed quietly, ducking his chin to shake his head. "And I refused to speak to Eamon from that point on. He visited less and less, didn't press me to talk as often when he did visit, and eventually Eamon just... stopped coming. I mean, say what you want to about stubborn ten-year-olds, I had  _conviction_."

Mathain grunted, reluctantly impressed. "And found you solace, in your chantry with your strange god?"

Alistair laughed, brief and bitter. "Even if I had been all  _Lelianner_  for Andraste, I still wouldn't have gotten along with the other students, so no. Not much solace at all, really."

"Do orphan shems not find kinship in their loss?"

"Well the urchin half of the lot thought I was putting on airs - by the fault of the tutor I'd been given in my formative years - and the noble-borns all thought I was  _too peasant_ to function, because  _reasons_." Alistair threw his hands forward, straightening to lean a hip on the bridge wall. "Or maybe they just didn't like  _me_ , by no fault of what I could ever do to actually impress any of them. Doesn't matter  _now_ , of course, but that's the history of it. Of  _me_  and - and why things might not go so well with Eamon."

Mathain's eyes narrowed in his side-long study of Alistair. "So it is. But that you assume you, yourself had no say with the decision of others to accept you... it tells much. _Da'shem_ ," Mathain inhaled, rocking forward and back on impatient heels. "I think, you have been treated abominably in your early seasons, and by this were early convinced that you were a thing worthy of that treatment. My people, we see much of this from those we take in from the cities, and regard the problem as a wound like any other, and address it with healing. If you were acting as a wounded thing -" Mathain rolled a shoulder back, watching the distant lake's horizon as he spoke. " _Abelas_. It is to my knowledge that shemlen do not treat wounded things with much care, or grace."

"To your knowledge, huh?" Alistair settled again to his elbows, mouth drawn back in doubt. "What is that, then? That you know so much about 'shems' and hate us so easily? Was your village burned down? Er, I mean, caravan? Was it bandits, or Orlesian Vanguards, or just - oh I don't know - disgruntled potato farmers?"

Mathain sidled close, as if to impart a secret. "Fur trappers, I recall. Hunting beavers in their dams." He chaffed his hands together, biting the inside of his cheek in thought.

"What, just that? I mean, I believe you, that it would have been something like a hunting grounds dispute -"

"Oh, nae,  _lethalin_ ," the word was delivered in condescension, Mathain eying Alistair with a tilted smirk. "I ought impart the tale some other time. What need I say to your estranged guardian, to convince him against Loghain?"

Alistair pulled himself away from the wall. "What should _you_ say? Not a flaming thing, if you can manage."

* * *

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	2. Chapter 2

: : o : : o : : o : :

* * *

There came a moment between the grisly skirmishes, when castle Redcliffe had fallen silent and glassy and eerie once more, that Mathain was found lingering in an emptied office, filling a wooden crate with valuables as might be lent to their cause.

Alistair, arms crossed, took rest in a doorway to watch the methodic foraging. "Are you  _looting_  Eamon's estate, even as we fight toward waking the man?"

Without glancing from his task, Mathain answered, "The sleeping Lord pays not the smithy, nor provides the food we must beg from the desperate and terrorized. And I never could understand shem fascination with  _ownership_. You  _own_  your lovers, you  _own_  your beasts of burden, you own your land and you own your tools and your clothing and your vanities and nothing is shared between you."

A hint of amusement colored Alistair's stern question - "Lovers?"

"Were not there wars waged between your kingdoms over wandering queens and unfaithful princes? Wars set up by the jealousy of lovers who thought it their right to own not only the lands they ruled, but all the people within?"

"It's scary how right you are, sometimes. Anyway," Alistair detached himself from the doorway. "The Arlessa's jewels would be nearer her sleeping chambers, in case I can't persuade you away from the theft. Anybody asks, there was a mighty argument. You drew your sword. I was soundly defeated." He approached the current box of loot to carefully pluck a pair of greaves upright, making room for the delicate collection of healing tinctures and the splendid helmet. "Hang on, is this is for us? This is all stuff we're all going to use, isn't it?"

"I wouldn't take that which we don't need, Alistair."

"Of course you wouldn't. I'm a bad person." Alistair sighed heavily through his nose. "Would an apology suffice?"

Mathain did now look up from the chest he had set to the heavy writing desk, arm buried elbow-deep between books bound in their supple leather. "For what?"

"I thought you were taking things to  _sell_."

Mathain glanced from Alistair to the door and back. "What's the difference, but carrying the coin to the poultice monger or the armor smith to then trade for that which we need more immediately?"

"Are you going to make me explain this?" Alistair backed to a shelf, turning to pull a book aside, revealing a small ivory statuette of a horse. "You are, aren't you. All right, so this here is worth, say, thirty silver. While that vial there is worth only, what, fifteen at the most? Maybe?" Alistair hefted the small statue in his palm before setting it back to its spot. "So  _this_ , is worth two of  _those_. And a valued bit of jewelry would be worth many, many more of  _those_."

Mathain rubbed an eye with the back of his knuckle, shaking his head. "I know what bartering is, Alistair. Only we haven't the time to do as much - and by any means, I am no thief."

"Still," Alistair nodded, jaw pushed out thoughtfully. "Jewelry. Keep it in mind. Isolde won't miss just  _a few_  baubles. We can blame the skeleton hordes; they like shiny things, right?"

Mathain scoffed to cover the chuckle hitching his breath. "It is a petty sense of humor you have there, shem."

"You love it."

A book slapped cover-down atop the table, Mathain quick to retrieve it as if the noise of such a fumble would further draw the shambling ghouls from the surrounding halls. A blush spread thick and hot from ear to ear, Mathain bit his lips into a thin line under the scowl now glued to the book as if it had leapt from his grip on purpose.

Alistair stared as the wooden chest was set to rights and closed, stared as Mathain squared his grip on the items crate, and stared as that crate was pulled up and walked from the room. He stared at the darkening tips of Mathain's ears as he passed, at the stiff carry of his shoulders and his restless shift of weight from foot to foot as the crate was handed to Leliana for her perusal.

Had Mathain blushed for dropping the book, or for the reason  _toward_  dropping the book? Was - was Mathain flustered? Had, er, had  _Alistair_  flustered the Dalishman with his teasing?

It was a credit to Alistair's self-awareness that he  _knew_  he made inappropriate remarks at inappropriate times. Suffering a grievous injury? 'Tis but a scratch. Suffering a very moderate injury? Woe, soon to perish. Hurlock ambush? Time to crack wise. Racial tension? Puns, galore. Loved one in dire peril, town overrun with nightmarish foes? Impulsive flirtation.

There was a sense to it, an intelligence; it wasn't just Alistair blurting all the wrong things in ignorance of any given situation. The worse things got, the funnier Alistair strove to be, the more the people around him laughed, the better everyone felt, the easier it was to keep alive. Mathain wasn't easy to amuse - falling in the category of those more ready to accept that Alistair was just  _too dumb_  to treat any tragedy, small or large, with the appropriate solemnity.

And there Alistair had gone and accidentally embarrassed the man, somehow, because  _Dalish,_ or else - and here Alistair was smart enough to know there  _was_  an 'or else' - or else Mathain had  _blushed_  because Alistair had, however accidentally, said a thing that was  _charming_. A thing that  _charmed_. And Alistair had felt, for one fleeting moment, as if he'd had some sort of  _advantage_  in dealing with Mahariel. As if he'd been  _charming_ , enough so to make a person blush.

 _Person_  person, not just that it was Mathain - but rather if Mathain, being so impenetrably angry all the damn time, had sat as a sort of ne'er-to-be on his pedestal; and now the act of  _charm_ , of  _being charming_  was not only within sight, for Alistair, but that he might actually prove  _pretty damn capable_  at the task if he ever should try towards anyone else. Not that he would, of course, ever attempt to charm  _anyone_  save those he was assured would never sit amenable to the effort.

Which was to say, that Alistair would not have said the thing he did, with such confidence, if he had thought for one  _moment_  that it were a thing that was true - that Mathain  _loved it_ , loved some part or action  _of Alistair_. That possibility was... not bad, no, but highly flaming  _unlikely_.

So Alistair uncrossed his arms with a shrug, resolved to put the matter aside for the easier one-sided banter with Sten, or the usual antagonization of Morrigan, or the stiff-kneed silence in Leliana's company because  _no way_  would he ever say anything so forward or risk the offense with someone he actually sort of maybe thought was actually - and again, if he thought there was ever a  _chance_  she might - but no, her? No, better not to even try.

And it was lost in this thought that Alistair did take his rest in a room that Mathain had not yet combed over, and did suffer the open-eyed surprise between them as Mathain did eventually enter the door, and Alistair did inflict the tight pull of a split lip as he grinned (an injury from their struggle through the demon-torn halls of that castle, of course, and Alistair certain he'd nearly lost a tooth against the inside of his own stupid helmet). At Alistair's grin, Mathain's scowl did settle dark and familiar in its usual place, and Alistair did feel his uncertainty ebb away.

"This is Eamon's study," Alistair noted, relaxing back on a well-used reading couch, sipping from the smooth round mouth of a healing vial to chase away the last aches of his arrow wounds. "Not much you'll find here, I don't think. Bit of brandy hidden behind the books on that shelf, just there. Might have medicinal use, if you know what I mean." And there it was, that which often crept so easily into Alistair's voice whenever he was speaking with anyone particularly stony - a verbal knee-jerk, a warmth of tone,  _teasing_. How easily Alistair's resolve had crumbled, there to find himself itching with curiosity over just what exactly  _could_  catch Mathain so off-kilter, even in the face of their current danger and woes.

No,  _especially_  in the face of their current danger and woes. Alistair  _was_  feeling petty, that much was certain - and he  _did_  blame Isolde for a lot of problems, past and current. If they should fail to see Eamon restored, Alistair could not begin to think what - what might they  _do_ , what might he say -

"I'll not be named a raiding looter like the desperate  _Lath'din_  of Snowfoot, but you might earn some coin from this," a necklace was bundled from its place in the open drawer Mathain had been searching, and tossed Alistair's way. "Might you choose to incriminate one of those toothy shamblers for the theft. 'Tis an old elvhenan design, so we know it twice burgled." Mathain flicked his hand as if to discard the matter. "Or else could argue that to the Dalish it has been returned, and passed on to further use by your trade."

Alistair unwrapped the small round thing from its felt bag, stilling. The half-empty vial of vitaen clattered to the clean-swept flagstones and rolled a trail of precious fluid all the way to the leg of Eamon's writing desk, behind which Mathain had given pause as well.

"What," Alistair half laughed, questioning Mathain with a look. "But this is - I wouldn't sell  _this_ , it's the - I thought I broke -" He stood, mumbling, "he must have gathered the pieces, had it repaired -" Alistair glanced up, caught between the reading couch and the door. "What do you mean, elvish? It's silverite stone, carved into a flame of Andraste, and -"

"Halla bone, silver because it is from the quick of the horn." Mathain argued softly, eyebrows drawing together as he rounded the end of the desk to approach. "The flames of that circle sun have decorated the bottom of Elgar'nan statues - who counts the sun as father and threw it underfoot to create night - long before your people adopted its design under the feet of a burning woman. See there the jealous moon that forever wishes to be as bright as the sun, chasing its path toward the days that it might overtake the sky and give to us a dark eclipse." Mathain invaded Alistair's open palm with a nimble illustration. "'Tis an old and well-known design, and that's Halla ivory you've got in your hand there da'shem, for sure and certain. Mayhaps the necklace of your mother was a similar replica, but -"

"I'd know this pendant with my eyes closed, Thain." Alistair's clasped the precious amulet, palm folding over palm. "I don't care where the design comes from, or what it's made of. I never thought I'd see this again." He shifted a step away so that he might more comfortably meet Mathain's eyes. "Thank you, really."

Mathain sighed silently, shoulders rising and falling in their shrug. "You are welcome, then. I am glad for what solace you might find, that a thing so heavy with memory has been returned."

"You know," Alistair's nose wrinkled above his wry grin. "My beard doesn't grow in at the cheeks. I  _could_  be part elf."

Mathain stared, flatly unblinking.

"Don't sound so enthusiastic, please, you'll make me blush."

Mathain blinked, eyes slow to open above the twist of his mouth. "So you aren't selling it, then?"

"Heard my father had a  _thing_  for elvish servants, randy bastard. Would explain much, actually, like the whole death-in-childbirth thing. Oh balls, now I've made myself sad. Well!" Alistair tucked the amulet back in its pouch, searching his belt for an appropriate pocket. "At least we know Eamon might have had  _some_  sentiment toward me. I'll be sure to get right on that whole reconciliation thing as soon as we've restored him."

"Alistair," Mathain stepped close again, head tilted that he might better scrutinize the desperately sarcastic man before him.

Alistair blinked hard a few times, and his grin settled as regular and unforced as all the rest of his grins. "We don't have time to dwell in the past, or to think on the unthinkable." He clasped Mathain's shoulder, as if  _he_  were the one who needed reassurance. "I'm setting an example, here. Senior Warden, blah blah leadership."

"I thought you reluctant to lead."

Alistair's laugh  _was_  genuine, however short and hard-edged. "Well I really can't leave it all up to  _you_ , Stabby McCrazypants. All but implying my mother was an  _elf_ , get out of here." And Alistair turned Mathain to the door and marched him out by the shoulders. "Go on, go, back to your lunacy with the Swamp Witch or Laysister or whomever you're making kissy-faces at lately."

Mathain left without protest or resistance, turning only to pull the door shut between he and Alistair - who had withdrawn to turn his back on the departure, posture too straight and voice too bright in the reassurance that he, er, only wanted to get that brandy afterall.

* * *

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